Lithium and hydrogen markets, thermal sludge treatment, and upcoming research

In this episode of the Blue Notes podcast, hosts Divya and Rhys discuss recent travels and conferences, including high-profile events on lithium and hydrogen. They delve into the lithium market and the technology breakthroughs in direct lithium extraction, as well as the challenges in the hydrogen economy. The conversation also covers advanced thermal sludge treatment technologies and recent regulatory changes in the EU Wastewater Directive.

With a packed schedule of reports and analyses, there's plenty of valuable content to look forward to over the summer.Divya and Rhys highlight upcoming research reports for BlueTech clients, including brine management and ZLD technologies, micropollutants, earth observation science, green chemistry, PFAS regulations, and the intriguing world ofnanobubbles.

Join our next web briefing on Brine Management and ZLD on 20th August: register here

The Blue Notes podcast and our upcoming work represent the cutting edge of sustainable technology and innovation. By keeping up with these advancements, we can drive our industries toward a greener, more sustainable future.

Stay tuned for more insights and detailed reports on these critical topics, and as always, feel free to reach out with questions or for more information on how you can stay ahead of the curve: knowledge@bluetechresearch.com

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Transcript

Divya: [00:00:00] Okay. Welcome everyone to a new, episode of Blue Notes podcast and welcome to my co host, Rhys. How are you keeping?

Rhys: Hi, Divya. Yeah, I'm good. Thanks. I've had a busy morning. Uh, one of those, uh, day to day upsets you sometimes get. I was dropping the kids off at school and closing the back door, the boot of my car, and the whole glass just shattered.

Divya: Oh



Rhys: I ended up with a big cleanup job. I had to ask the shop for a bus, dustpan and brush to get the glass of the pavement.

So people, the dogs didn't get fat on their legs and drive it off to a garage and, uh, yeah, interesting start to the day, but, uh, we're back on, back on course now.

Divya: Oh gosh, Rhys. That sounds like a disaster. Sorry about that. Hope everybody's safe because glass shattering is, can be scary when you've got kids in the backseat, when you've

Rhys: make us all jump. Yeah, no. Luckily we were all outside just looking at it. I'm like standing on the [00:01:00] back of the car.

Divya: Oh, cars, cars aren't, cars are my nemesis because they're just, they just perpetually, there's always something wrong with cars. They just, as reliable as we think they are, as machines have been around for a long time, there's always something wrong with them, I feel.

Rhys: they're almost like organic things in the way that you have to keep on maintaining them and keep on, you know, they're the sort of, they'll just sit there. And how

Divya: exactly.

Rhys: about you? How are you? How are you doing?

Divya: Good, good. We're finally in the new home. So I don't know, it's a kind of mixed, mixed feelings of obviously being excited, being in the new house and getting to know the neighbors. and it helps because it's, we're in the warmer seasons now and we see, bouncy castles being propped up every day outside in people's gardens and it's nice to get to know your neighbors, but I do miss my, mobile office, I must say.

Rhys: It did sound quite cozy. Yeah.

Divya: Yeah,

Rhys: this all worked out. Congratulations.

Divya: thank you. Yeah, no, looking forward to settling in here. We've still got [00:02:00] weeks ahead of us of unpacking and sorting things out as you, as you know, we've got boxes and boxes of stuff. When you move home with family, it's, you forget you can be very, very organized and putting things away and organizing things into boxes, thinking when you move into the house, you're making your life easier.

When you actually move in, you're like, You know, boxes go missing, you don't know, you've mislabeled them and all sorts. So

Rhys: You will never open some of these boxes. 

Divya: They'll just go into the attic and never come out again. Okay, well, let's get started. looking at what we've been busy with over the last few weeks. we've been traveling quite a bit. I know a lot of the team have.

Rhys: Our tag expert, Steve Gluck's been particularly busy at events. He's been to a, very high profile, lithium and hydrogen conferences back to back and reported back on those. very interesting. So we've got, conference briefings. from both of those available on our platform. the lithium, event in particular was, I think the [00:03:00] biggest one in the world.

it was the first market, event in Las Vegas. lots of, interesting technology breakthroughs being talked about. particularly in terms of direct lithium extraction, DLE. and, discussion of technology such as molecular recognition technologies, which is kind of advanced absorption, ion exchange daily technique, where you have bespoke media, which provide very, very exceptional selectivity.

that's very interesting. Lots of, new companies popping up. Hewa Lithium is one which caught my eye. They are a company which claimed to go from brine to finished battery products within two days. So they. sort of across the whole value chain there.

Divya: Yeah.

Rhys: and yeah, overall, surprisingly, actually the lithium market is quite bearish for the next few years.

there's a bit of an oversupply at the moment. but long term demand projections, very solid, China, absolutely dominating production at the moment, but, lots of activity in the U S as well. ExxonMobil [00:04:00] signed an agreement. supplying battery grade lithium from its smack over formation from its fracking area. So that was very interesting. and yeah, there was no time for rest. Steve was straight off to, another conference on hydrogen. this is the hydrogen technology conference and expo 2024. And funnily enough, it's kind of the opposite case in terms of the hydrogen economy. There's, uh, whereas lithium, there's a bit of an oversupply on hydrogen projects.

There are not nearly enough being bought online to meet decarbonization goals. It's actually five percent of the target, in terms of projects, hydrogen projects that have reached final investment decision. There's an enormous gap there, to be made up. And the actual production costs are pretty high, stubbornly high.

the target is two dollars per kilo of hydrogen. That's the economic target. A recent [00:05:00] study by Dutch consultancy firm TNO found that The non subsidized cost is 17. So way, way above

Divya: Yeah. We have a lot of work to do to bring it down to two.

Rhys: exactly. But I think it will go in that direction. I mean, there are challenges, but as we say in our hydrogen report, a third of greenhouse gases from industries like aluminium, steel, shipping and so on don't have any other realistic.

Decarbonization solutions other than hydrogen. So it is going that way.

Divya: no, we had interesting conversations on our hydrogen and Steve in particular, Steve Block our tag expert, shares some interesting perspectives on hydrogen. So if any of our clients want to delve into this a bit more with Steve, we're happy to arrange for a call. Let's maybe turn our attention to sludge for a minute because we've been hearing some interesting things in that area too.

So if you've been following Bluetech's weekly analyst alerts, you might have, for clients, you might have picked up the news on, Yorkshire [00:06:00] water being awarded 2. 3 million pounds from Ofwat's innovation fund for its advanced thermal conversion gasification project. The project aims to convert a hundred percent of sewage sludge into biochar, syngas, and ash, I think we're going to start to hear more announcements like this as the interest in advanced thermal sludge treatment increases.

regardless of whether We're incinerating, land applying, or land filling sludge. There are a number of advanced thermal sludge treatment technologies coming into the mix. and I mean technologies such as pyrolysis, gasification, hydrothermal carbonization, hydrothermal liquefaction, supercritical water oxidation.

There are all of these different classes of technologies under the umbrella term of advanced thermal sludge treatment. And they're coming, emerging more and more into conversations because of their ability to address growing challenges, for instance, such as destroying emerging contaminants, PFAS or microplastics, and also positively contributing to concepts such as circular [00:07:00] economy and resource recovery.

So Bluetech have just completed an innovation impact analysis that provides a framework to analyze these different technologies and identify pain points and potential for market breakthrough. And I think what struck me when reading that report is firstly, the number of different types of technology classes that fall into this bucket.

there were six or seven classes. And secondly, there are strong drivers for all of these technologies. But despite the drivers, adoption of these technologies, we think through our research, we think adoption is going to be not as quick or not as fast because there's a lot of pieces of in the jigsaw puzzle that have to fall into place first.

For instance, operationally, energy efficiency has to match what's out there. These are also increasingly complex technologies. So you're talking about training operators, to maintain these technologies, these systems. And don't forget on the regulatory side, without regulations that favor these technologies, adoption is going to be slower.

[00:08:00] So overall, I think we're seeing a gap in the market for these technologies emerge. we just need to see drivers to push these technologies, the adoption of these technologies forward, but a really interesting space to continue to watch and make sure you refer to that report, called the innovation impact analysis report.

Rhys: Yeah, it's, it is interesting and I agree with you. It's, it's very, there are huge challenges, operationally and cost wise, but things are moving, just today, I haven't had a chance to catch up on the detail of the news yet, but I see that 3 7 4 Water has got a agreement for a super critical water oxidation, facility,

Divya: Wow.

Rhys: But yeah, as you say, it's all about regulation and, uh, which leads us nicely onto the regulation watch, which is something we are producing. We're aiming to cover a lot more regulation and we're kicking off this month with a look at the urban wastewater treatment directive, which is a 30 year old piece of EU [00:09:00] legislation, which was recast a couple of months ago.

with some pretty dramatic changes, lots of, enhanced requirements for advanced treatment levels across the EU and, a, duty to remove micropollutants. so the new rules are going to require tertiary treatment by 2039 at all treatment plants covering 150, 000 people and over, and that's aimed mainly at removing nitrogen and phosphorus.

From wastewater. And then by 2045, those plants will be required to target removal of micro pollutants like PFAS, pharmaceutical residues, and so on. What's called quaternary treatment. So that's going to lead to, a huge demand for membrane bioreactors, activated carbon filters, RO, advanced filtration systems.

So, and the question is always with these things is who's going to pay. and that's the other quite dramatic thing. there's a extended producer [00:10:00] responsibility clause, which will mean that the people paying are the pharmaceuticals and cosmetics companies. They've got to finance at least 80 percent of the cost of this quaternary treatment. and that's estimated at 1. 2 billion per year across the EU by 2040. Earlier, there was some back and forth on this. It was going to be a hundred percent. But the pharmaceutical industry lobbied successfully to, they argued that, the taxpayer gets the benefit of, medicines. So maybe they should pay for some of the cost of manufacturing and therefore the wastewater.

So national budgets in the year are going to pay for 20 percent of that cleanup. quite a big regulatory move this, month or the last couple of months from Europe.

Divya: absolutely an area to continue to track and, I think that summarizes some of the research that we've been doing, over the last few weeks. just want to quickly cover some of the upcoming work, for our clients. You're not going to be bored over the summer. Reports that we have on the go at the [00:11:00] moment, brine management, ZLD will be looking at that again.

It's be a third iteration or third update from blue tech, but really looking at evaluating the different technologies and, how far the markets moved rainwater harvesting. We'll be taking a deeper dive into that and looking at the opportunities and possibilities for rainwater harvesting, particularly from an industrial perspective.

We'll be studying the micropollutant landscape, the next wave of micropollutants to be aware of. We'll be also looking at studying earth observation science and How, quickly this area is evolving, green chemistry, the market need for bio based chemicals, bio flocculants, bio coagulants.

Uh, we mentioned such thermal technologies that report it will be, is, is nearly ready as well. Um, we'll be looking at PFAS regulations, both in the U S and EU, and nanobubbles, which is a really interesting technology area. We had a company called Nanobox showcase at Bluetech Forum, but, they're not the only newer entrants in this market.

There's a [00:12:00] new few new other players that have joined. so we'll be re evaluating where we are in the nano bubble space. And of course we'll, we're getting, ramping up our efforts and preparations for WEFTEC also, which will, which is just coming around the corner here in October.

So, we'll have a number of, Innovative showcase companies join us at WEFTEC. So lots to look out for and lots to be excited about, I think.

Rhys: Yeah, certainly. So no need to buy airport novels. You can read lots of, lots to read on the beach coming up. Watch this space.

Divya: Yep. Thanks very much, Reese. 

Rhys: Thanks, Divya. 

Divya: Have a good one.